Some R packages that require installation from source are hard to install. Here, I just record some of the problems and solutions I have came acroos when installing R packages on macOS.
rgdal package
It is kinda annoying to install this package. But I find this answer to be helful for me to install it.
Basically, in terminal, install GDAL first, which will take a while:
brew install --with-postgresql gdal
Then in R:
install.packages('rgdal', type = "source", configure.args=c('--with-proj-include=/usr/local/include','--with-proj-lib=/usr/local/lib'))
sf package
According to its github readme file, we may be able to install binary package for sf. But this is not the case for me today. This may because that R 3.4.0 just released and they did not prepare a binary version on CRAN yet. So, I still need to install from source. In its readme file, we need to do this in terminal first (takes a while, ~10 minutes):
brew unlink gdal
brew tap osgeo/osgeo4mac && brew tap --repair
brew install proj
brew install geos
brew install udunits
brew install gdal2 --with-armadillo --with-complete --with-libkml --with-unsupported
brew link --force gdal2
Then we can go to R and install it normally.